


The Ruby Tie-tack

by Vanny



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-08-30
Updated: 2011-11-25
Packaged: 2017-10-23 05:53:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/246935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vanny/pseuds/Vanny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(AU) Droog's sudden death puts strain on the remaining Midnight Crew, as well as fraying the uneasy flushed relationship between Slick and Snowman as they struggle to piece together what happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I should note that this takes place in an AU continuity (that isn't explained within the fic at all, SO THERE) in which there is some tentative goodwill between Snowman and the Midnight Crew, and a somewhat strained redrom relationship between she and Slick.

The worst thing about finding the body is that it’s all she finds. She has no killer’s face to carry in her mind’s eye, no names to put on a hit list. He is alone.

And she is alone. Later, she’s grateful for that, because she kneels beside him and stupidly tells him to stop it, she knows he’s just trying to get back at her for something.

She knows he wasn’t killed where she found him. He was dragged here; Diamonds Droog would never let himself die half in a drainage ditch with a tea-colored stain spreading slowly up his immaculate white tie. The bastards snapped his neck and left him in the water. His deck is scattered over and around him, nothing but paper cards getting soggy. His eyes stare up emptily, and his face is smooth, untwisted by pain or rage or fear. His mouth is a little open, and he looks a little lost.

She takes his picture before she brings him home. Evidence is evidence, but she’s not letting the police department’s flatfooted vultures pick him over, even if it means leaving him here for a while to drop a sudden and ludicrous wad of cash on a camera.

The next step is quicker. She can’t teleport with a person, but a corpse isn’t a person. She has him home within seconds of dragging him up into her arms.

The first thing Slick does is accuse her of killing him. She smiles bitterly and hands him the camera.

Boxcars is predictable. He slams his door off its hinges and reduces his room to splinters. He comes out white with plaster dust, and Deuce takes his hand and pulls him off to curl up tight on a bed that is far too small, but he keeps reappearing. He won’t touch or look at the body, and he doesn’t want anyone else to touch it or look at it either. He fills the doorway to snarl them away again and again, until Slick snaps, “just go the fuck to sleep, you fat fuck!” and Boxcars inexplicably obeys.


	2. Chapter 2

She and Slick, enmity forgotten, put their heads together over hastily-developed photographs and see nothing but a corpse and some water and cards. In desperation, they take the pictures to Problem Sleuth, who begins by smiling too much and ends by frowning too much in an attempt to look hard-edged. In between, he lays out a plan.

“So here’s what you do. You start asking questions. Don’t look at me like you weren’t gonna start asking questions anyway. Just keep doing what you were gonna do, threaten people, whatever you gangsters like to do--”

“Yeah, so what the fuck are we paying you for?” Slick says, fidgeting with something inside his coat.

“Cool your jets! I’m getting to it. So do all that...but do it to the wrong people.” Snowman watches Slick. Sleuth will never know how close he comes to gaining a couple extra inches of mouth.

“Explain to me just how the _fuck_ that works.”

“The real killer will notice, see? First off, they’ll get real smug that you’re on the wrong track. But then a bee gets in their bonnet. It’s like all their hard work is going to waste. Then they start sticking their nose out, making mistakes. They’ll lead us right to them.”

Slick is hard to convince, but in the end they decide to start with Spots Domino and a couple of rival gangs too stupid to have ever gotten the drop on Droog. Slick draws a little blood, but he isn’t satisfied. He tells Snowman again and again that he isn’t convinced she didn’t do it, and she doesn’t bother denying it. That would only make it worse. Instead, she watches his slight frame beside her, jittering with rage, and she insults him.

“You couldn’t interrogate a worm,” she says. “What’s the matter, afraid of getting a little blood on your shoes? The horse hitcher’s a nice touch; too bad you can barely lift it.” He calls her a fork-tongued harridan in return. He’s railing, and if he doesn’t have something to rail against, he’ll fall, so she’s there.

When they get home, she undoes his top button, and he digs his claws into her dress and tears all the way down with a shuddering give of fabric that sets her teeth on edge and makes her want to smash his face bloody against the bedpost. The body they buried in the morning stops her. She imagines Droog shaking his head at her, his face impassive; even in her mind’s eye, he is trying to brush the brownish water stain out of his tie.

She kisses Slick instead of throwing him to the floor. He bites her lip, then slides down and bites her shoulder, clamping his jaw slowly tighter until, with a faint pop, his teeth puncture her carapace and a thread of blood runs down her chest. She hisses and digs her claws into the soft places between segments at the back of his neck. Still holding on, she pushes him back onto the bed, and by the time she’s finished he doesn’t even have the breath to cry her name.

He sleeps afterward, deep and heavy; even when she jiggles his shoulder, he does no more than squeeze his eyelids and bare his teeth. Only then does she touch him gently, skimming her knuckles across his forehead, brushing her fingers back and forth across the sinewy curve of his neck, leaning down to kiss imaginary tears from his dry cheeks.

In her head, Droog approves, but remains more concerned with the state of his tie.


	3. Chapter 3

Hot breath on her face wakes her. She opens her eyes to morning lamplight--no windows this far underground--and Slick’s good eye, burning and hollow as if he hasn’t slept at all, though he didn’t move all night. Rings of metal gleam at the corner of her right eye, his mechanical arm balancing him, and the other is clenched around something and held to his chest.

“You’d better have a really, really fucking amazing explanation for this,” he pushes through a locked jaw.

She knows her next line, and she doesn’t want to say it, but he says nothing else and his eye sears her. She smiles, which she knows will infuriate him most, almost purrs the question she’s supposed to ask: “An explanation for what, Slick?” She expects fury, spitting and swearing, but not the metal hand locked around her throat, his narrowed eye, his silence. The palm of the hand choking her is warm, but it’s the warmth of the dozen tiny engines that animate it, and she wishes he was choking her with the hand that is still flesh.

“For this,” he says finally, and through the spots in her eyes she can see the dark glitter of a diamond-shaped ruby, bordered in gold. He’s holding a tiepin, Droog’s tiepin between his fingers. “I found it in your jewelry box,” he says in a voice that won’t shoot a man with a gun if it can get away with beating him to death with a horse hitcher, “with your necklaces.”

She blacks out for a moment.

Slick has released her when she comes to, and she considers casually reaching out and breaking a finger. Inadequate payment for nearly strangling her, but it would be satisfying to hear him scream. Her hands stay where they are, and Slick glares at her, and in her head Droog wrings ditchwater from his tie, unconcerned with the goings-on and empty of advice.

“I don’t know where it came from,” she tells him hoarsely. “I didn’t take it.” Droog looks up only briefly.

“Right. And what else were you gonna say?” Slick’s voice is heavy with sarcasm.

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

“What?””

She clears her throat. Drawing breath is still something of a struggle. “What were you doing in my jewelry box?”

“I had a hunch,” he says with a sneer.

Maybe she’ll break his finger after all. She sits up. “You’ve been talking to Sleuth without me.”

“Well, what the fuck do you think? You’re suspect number one, baby.”

“If I’d killed him, I would have left him for you to find. And I wouldn’t be stupid enough to steal his jewelry and put it with my things. Are you blind, Slick?”

“If anyone’s smart enough to frame up a fake frame job, it’s you.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Fuck you,” he says, but he doesn’t try to stop her when she walks out.


	4. Chapter 4

Several hours later, she perches on Problem Sleuth’s desk, one leg crossed over the other, looking down at the man in his nest of barred shadows. One of his eyes disappears in the sharp, black lines cast by the blinds on his window. His grin, framed in a bar of light, is bone-white, as white as Droog’s tie should be. “What can I do for you, sweetheart?” he says.

“You can start with a drink. Then you can take me dancing. Then--”

“Didn’t know you were into Prospitians. What changed your mind?”

She closes her eyes for a moment. Droog is waiting there. His hands are still on his tie, but he’s staring at her. He shakes his head once, slowly, then again, more urgently. “I want to hurt Slick,” she tells Sleuth anyway. Droog goes still, and she blots him out by opening her eyes.

“Fair enough,” Sleuth says, and holds out his hand.

It is a long night. It ends breathlessly with the two of them in a hotel room, beige-gold and clean-smelling, secured with nothing more than her name and a wave of her hand; she’ll take care of the bill later. She drapes herself over his shoulders and asks him to order champagne. His black eyes glitter and his grin is a half-grin to hide that he is already dizzy with drink. He manages to order without slurring, but she insists on pouring when it comes.

After the burn of hard liquor, the champagne is sweet and cool. The glass tinges Sleuth’s fingers with wavering yellow light, and the soft gold of the sofa picks up butter-yellow and pale blue tones in the shine of his carapace. He looks right here. He is small, not the wiry stick-thin of Slick, but compact and neatly built. He is smiling as he drinks his champagne, reckless and blunt-toothed. He has his charms.

A sudden sound startles her out of watching him. He does not look up, not even when its low, persistent rattle comes again. She jerks her head around and sees Droog, seated on the edge of the bed with an arc of cards between his hands. They are clean and new, though his tie is as stained as ever. He shuffles the way he did everything: precisely, perfectly. The sound drills into her. She lunges for the record player.

“What’s the matter?” Sleuth asks. He slurs noticeably now.

“Nothing. I want to dance.”

“Haven’t you had enough dancing?” But he stands up. He splays his feet wide apart. His shoulders stoop. He staggers. “What--”

The creak of recorded violins drowns out the cards, but Sleuth’s breathing is loud in her ears now, labored. “You’re drunk,” she says.

“No.” He struggles to lift his head and look at her. “You--” One knee buckles and he sags downward. “Slipped something in my...” his voice fades, muffled against the floor.

Droog has stopped shuffling, and she can think again. Her heart steadies. She is in control. She stands over Sleuth, smiles down. “Surely you saw this coming.”

He rolls his head to look at her and mouths something that looks like _bitch_ before the drug takes him.

She kneels beside him and touches his face and listens to his breathing. Behind her, Droog says, _clever of you,_ very softly, hardly more than a breath; _you never pretended innocence; it was your honesty that fooled him. He couldn’t resist. But what do you hope to accomplish?_

She keeps her eyes on Sleuth. Once she’s lifted him off the floor, it is an easy thing to sling his limp form across her shoulders. She leaves him in the damp alley outside the Crew’s hideout. Let Slick wonder about _that._


	5. Chapter 5

She pays Sleuth’s office a visit the following morning. She goes there in her swift, silent way: first standing in one place, then a shadow, then her body condenses like dew in a new place. No one ever hears or sees or smells her coming. She waits outside, just out of view of the frosted window (real glass these days, yes, Problem Sleuth has come up in the world), and listens. He talks to himself, she knows. She waits for a muttered complaint about his hangover. Maybe Slick will even be there.

Instead, she hears a voice not due back in town for a week yet, an anxious, slightly affected tenor. “...sure he’ll be all right, I’m quite sure he will,” it says. “After all, he’s had much worse. But all the same, we ought to take him flowers. Don’t you think? Perhaps a card.” In the hall, Snowman’s eyes narrow. Her own careful fingers had tipped the powder into Sleuth’s drink, not a grain in excess; this sounds all wrong.

“A card?” The second voice is low and liquor-roughened, full of disgust. “For fuck’s sake.”

“It’s only polite, Dick,” Pickle Inspector says mildly.

“Fuck polite! He doesn’t need our fuckin’ sympathy, he needs us to _find_ the assholes and show ‘em you don’t mess with Team Sleuth!”

“Spades Slick thinks it was Snowman.”

“Since when do we trust that asshole?” Ace Dick snarls.

“Why would he beat Sleuth within an inch of his life and leave him outside his own hideout? It told us where his hideout _is_ , for starters. He isn’t quite stupid enough to do that on purpose.” The Inspector’s carefully modulated tones quaver with frustration.

“Maybe it was a setup. Wants us to think it was her.”

They go on arguing, but she’s heard enough. She steps backward into empty space, and when she steps back out of it, she’s in a hotel room--not last night’s, but a new one done in ruby and charcoal grey. Droog meets her there. He looks at her this time, with blank eyes that make her wonder if he is somehow blind as well as dead. She dismisses the thought; he isn’t even real.

 _Somebody got the drop on you, girl,_ he says dryly.

“Slick,” she breathes.

 _You know better._

“Someone’s trying to send a message.”

 _But not to Slick._ He says it slowly, pedantically, as if he wants to be absolutely _sure_ she’s getting it.

“No,” she says. “Not to Slick. To me.”


	6. Chapter 6

Between one breath and another she appears at the foot of Sleuth’s bed, a little magic trick that gets her past inconveniences like visiting hours and his condition and whether he wants visitors or not. It is too useful to bother her, most of the time, but she does wonder if she might have more of an edge if she were forced to move like ordinary people. Like Droog, who could break any lock set in front of him, in complete silence. Who moved like a ghost through the shadows despite his height and the stark black of his suit and the glowing white of his tie. She looks around for him, but he is not there. She is alone with Sleuth.

“Who’re y’lookin’ for, sweetheart?” croaks a voice. Long practice keeps her from jumping. She fills her lungs with mechanical slowness until her heart stops hammering. While she checked for phantoms, Sleuth has opened one eye to a dark slit. He is looking at her. He is even managing a smile, crookeder than usual through swollen lips. She sees the edge of a cracked tooth.

“You,” she says softly.

“Look no further. Y’know...Slick was right about you. Y’r a bitch.”

“You knew that already,” she reminds him. “You said that already. Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Like what?”

“Like who beat you.”

“Thought y’wanted me to tell you something y’didn’t know,” he rasps.

“I don’t. It wasn’t Slick, was it,” she says. Sleuth looks at her. His carapace is cracked in half a dozen visible places, buckled outward with swelling, and there must be more wounds hidden under bandages and blankets. He can only open one eye, and that only partway. He can barely move his mouth. Somehow, his smile is still cocksure. Acid rolls in Snowman’s stomach. She bears down on him, sets the tips of her claws into the faint unevenness of a crack along his cheekbone. She digs in. She smiles when he stops smiling. “You think it was me?”

“‘Course,” he manages, cautious of moving his head. It would be easy for her to splinter his outer skin and tear the flesh underneath. He knows it. She’s glad. She’d hate to have to explain.

She leans in close to whisper in his ear. “Sleuth, if I was going to beat you, I’d have kept you conscious. So you could feel it. So if you remember who it was, do let me know. I’d like to have a chat with them.” She straightens. Her claws unhook from his face. He breathes again.

She goes. She can just hear him calling “Hey, wait,” as she steps into the empty roar of interstitial space.


	7. Chapter 7

She comes out in a phone booth and dials the hideout, a key-pattern that her fingers know like they know the grips of her whip and her lance and her gun; she’s called Slick a thousand times, just to say _hello, Slick. I’ve got your little friend, Slick. Beat you to it again, Slick. Watch your back, Slick._ He’d say, _what do you want, bitch?_ and she’d answer, _Oh, nothing. Just killing time._

“Putting you through now,” says the operator.

“Who the fuck are you, and how did you get this number?” Slick snarls, tinny on the other end of the line.

“Hello, Slick,” she says.

“Oh. It’s you. What do you want?”

She draws in a breath. “I didn’t do it, Slick. Not Sleuth, and not Droog.”

“So what? I’m supposed to just take your word for it? ‘Cause you’re just the most trustworthy person I know? Bullshit, Snowman. I’m done here.”

“Slick, listen to me. This isn’t one of our games. Something is going on here. Someone is--” _after me,_ she thinks, but cuts herself off, not wanting to sound weak. Not wanting to sound afraid.

Slick is clever enough to fill in the blanks himself, and laughs, an ugly sound. “Say I believe you,” he says harshly, making it clear that he doesn’t. “So what? You’re a big girl. Handle your own shit.”

“Slick--”

A week ago, she was Crew, but now he hangs up. She keeps the phone to her ear for a moment, listening to the tone, and then does the same.

 _That’s how it happens,_ Droog says. She turns around, and he’s there, blank-eyed and stained. She can’t hear breathing. It’s because he’s dead, she first tells herself, and then because he isn’t _real,_ but she feels crowded into the corner of the booth just the same, and though he isn’t breathing, he seems to be eating up all her air.

“How what happens?” she whispers.

 _One minute you’re safe and sound. Untouchable. On top of the world._

She’s breathing rapidly, shallowly, and her mouth feels dry. She tries to swallow, and can’t. Droog continues.

 _The next, you’re dying in the desert._ He’s smiling a little. _What will you do? Make another deal with the devil?_

She forces a haughty smile. “Are you offering?”

 _Don’t be stupid. I’m a figment of your imagination. A symptom of madness, maybe._

“So what do I do?”

She is interrupted by a knock on the glass of the booth. There’s a Dersite outside. She whirls, and takes him in all at once, the way she always evaluates pawns, a habit she hasn’t been able to shake since she was Queen: size, gender, classification, potential usefulness, potential threat. This one is small, stocky, with narrow, wide-set eyes, and he’s in uniform. This is a strange thing: it is impossible not to know her on sight, and Midnight City’s beat cops generally avoid her, especially Dersites. They know her strength; no prison can hold her; and remembered abuses make her presence unpleasant.

This one has some guts, apparently. “My apologies, ma’am,” he says, a little pompously, utterly unperturbed by the glass muffling his voice, “for interrupting your...” he trails off momentarily, unable to fill the gap with what exactly she was doing, but he picks it up again with more enthusiasm than ever. “...but I could not help but notice your apparent distress, and as an officer of the law, I am honor-bound to--”

“It’s all right,” she says, though she can still feel Droog at her shoulder. She forces herself not to glance at him; the little officer can’t see him, of course. “Go on, please. I’m fine.”

He gazes at her for another moment, eyes narrower still, but he doesn’t find whatever it is he’s looking for, and finally he nods, sharp and businesslike, and turns away. She watches his short, swift stride, and when she’s sure he’s out of earshot, she murmurs, “Thank you.”

And she turns back to Droog. His smirk has disappeared. He looks distant, and once again, he’s fidgeting with his tie. This time, he fingers the tiny hole, the imprint in the silk where his tie-tack should be. “Droog?” she says.

 _Find Boxcars,_ he replies.

She expects him to fade away, but he doesn’t move. She repeats his name, but he doesn’t answer; his gaze is locked on his tie. She waits, but there is no change. He is still there when she leaves the phone booth.

When she’s halfway down the block, she glances back. A streetlamp glares off the glass of the booth, but she can just see the silhouette of his hat, the bend of his head. He is lighting a cigarette. He is still there.


End file.
